{"id":6430,"date":"2015-09-04T14:41:41","date_gmt":"2015-09-04T20:41:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=6430"},"modified":"2015-09-08T07:03:51","modified_gmt":"2015-09-08T13:03:51","slug":"the-donald-and-the-swarm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=6430","title":{"rendered":"The Donald and The Swarm"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In a tweeted response to my\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.politico.com\/magazine\/story\/2015\/09\/2016-election-social-media-ruining-politics-213104?paginate=false\"><em>Politico<\/em> essay<\/a> on social media&#8217;s influence on the 2016 campaign, <em>The Atlantic<\/em>&#8216;s political editor, Yoni Appelbaum, suggests that cable TV, rather than social media, is the real driver of the Trump phenomenon.\u00a0He offers a chart as backup:<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"550\" data-dnt=\"true\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">Nicholas Carr argues that Trump is a product of social media. Really? Here\u2019s cable coverage: <a href=\"http:\/\/t.co\/5sJKGIep0M\">http:\/\/t.co\/5sJKGIep0M<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/t.co\/rNOWa4X2HC\">pic.twitter.com\/rNOWa4X2HC<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&mdash; Yoni Appelbaum (@YAppelbaum) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/YAppelbaum\/status\/639850725493899265?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">September 4, 2015<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>I think Appelbaum may be mistaking effect\u00a0for cause.\u00a0Yes, Trump has dominated cable coverage over the last month. But Trump has\u00a0dominated <em>all<\/em> coverage over the last month. Pull together the same\u00a0chart for, say, print news or radio news\u00a0\u2014 perhaps\u00a0even <a href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/search?hl=en&amp;as_q=trump&amp;as_epq=&amp;as_oq=&amp;as_eq=&amp;as_nlo=&amp;as_nhi=&amp;lr=&amp;cr=&amp;as_qdr=m&amp;as_sitesearch=theatlantic.com&amp;as_occt=any&amp;safe=images&amp;as_filetype=&amp;as_rights=\">for TheAtlantic.com<\/a> \u2014\u00a0and you&#8217;ll almost certainly see a similar picture. The news media is a swarm organism. No individual medium operates in isolation.<\/p>\n<p>Raw measures of\u00a0media coverage, in other words, reveal\u00a0who&#8217;s getting covered, but they don&#8217;t say much\u00a0about why coverage is playing out the way it is.\u00a0<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>I certainly don&#8217;t think Trump is a product of one thing. He&#8217;s a product of many things, some having to do with media and some not. (His flying machines <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wsj.com\/articles\/trumps-big-boost-his-own-air-fleet-1441382605\">help<\/a>, apparently.) But I would argue that the best way to explain\u00a0his rise and his staying power in the race \u2014\u00a0despite making and standing by statements that would likely have doomed him in any earlier presidential contest\u00a0\u2014 is by looking at what&#8217;s changed in campaigns and their coverage. What&#8217;s changed is that social media has reached a critical mass of influence\u00a0\u2014 just as radio did in the 1924 race and TV did in the 1960 race. And, for the reasons I discuss in the <em>Politico<\/em> piece, social media is particularly well-suited to drawing attention to and sustaining a candidate like Trump.<\/p>\n<p>Radio didn&#8217;t kill off print,\u00a0TV didn&#8217;t kill off radio or print, and social media isn&#8217;t going to kill off TV or radio or print. All those mediums\u00a0affect and reflect the race. But, increasingly, it&#8217;s the social-media swarm that&#8217;s\u00a0determining the direction\u00a0of the news-media swarm.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In a tweeted response to my\u00a0Politico essay on social media&#8217;s influence on the 2016 campaign, The Atlantic&#8216;s political editor, Yoni Appelbaum, suggests that cable TV, rather than social media, is the real driver of the Trump phenomenon.\u00a0He offers a chart as backup: Nicholas Carr argues that Trump is a product of social media. Really? Here\u2019s [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6430","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6430","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6430"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6430\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6469,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6430\/revisions\/6469"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6430"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6430"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6430"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}